The reef aquarium hobby used to be just as much about building what we needed as it was about unlocking the secrets of keeping saltwater fish, and making corals grow. The last decade has seen an explosion of mass-produced skimmers, pumps and especially accessories for a uses diversity of uses and applications.
We’ve made a basic DIY dosing line holder before but we’ve had to dust off our DIY skills once more to make a custom holder for the thicker walls of some of our current coral tanks. Most dosing line holders either hang on the edge of a sump, usually no more than half an inch thick, or they use magnets to stay in place, again not usually designed with particularly thick walls in mind.
Therefore we decided to lightly engineer a super basic dosing line holder using the commonly available aquarium material, PVC pipe. By taking a 3 inch length of one inch diameter pipe and cutting out about 90 degrees of it we end up with a wedge to sit on the edge of the tank, and a nice little lip that can be cemented onto it.
The next step is to drill the required number of holes for the tubing to pass through, in our case it was three. The center hole is drilled perpendicular to the surface of the PVC ‘lip’ while the outer holes are drilled at angles pointed away from center – this is done simply to direct the calcium, magnesium and buffer hoses away from each other so as to not cause any unwanted precipitate.
Finally, each side of the PVC pipe to be attached is lightly sanded and bonded together using regular clear PVC cement. Small clamps are used to make sure that firm contact is made between the resting three-quarter circle pipe and the top, up curved quarter circle piece of pipe.
Within minutes the two separated pieces of PVC are now bonded into a single structure once again, and the feed holes are well spaced and pointed in such away that the dosing lines are held out of water but not too close together. We’re definitely going to be making more effort our DIY reefing ideas since we’ve had an entire studio and a workshop to thoroughly and efficiently develop the various reef tanks.
